Running your griffon application in fullscreen mode at log4p

Running your griffon application in fullscreen mode

Published by peter October 14th, 2008 in groovy.

I've been doing some development using Griffon lately. Griffon is a Grails like application framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy which lets you create Java Webstart applications without the hassle. It takes a clean MVC approach including nifty automatic binding of the model to the view. If you want to give Griffon a go, please have a look at the Quick Start guide.

I was looking for a solution to run the application I wrote in fullscreen mode. It took me a while to figure out how to do this. In the end it was quite simple.

Griffon offers a couple of hooks to execute code on specific states of the application lifecycle. The following hooks are availlable:

griffon-app/lifecycle/Initialize.groovy
griffon-app/lifecycle/Ready.groovy
griffon-app/lifecycle/Shutdown.groovy
griffon-app/lifecycle/Startup.groovy
griffon-app/lifecycle/Stop.groovy

I added the following code to the 'griffon-app/lifecycle/Ready.groovy' script:

PLAIN TEXT

GROOVY:

import java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment
def graphicsEnvironment = GraphicsEnvironment.localGraphicsEnvironment
def device = graphicsEnvironment.screenDevices.find{it.fullScreenSupported}
device?.setFullScreenWindow(app.appFrames[0])

The 'app' variable in the script is an implicit variable pointing to the actual application. Via this variable one can get access to all parts of the application; since I've just got one frame choosing was easy.

Haven't had the change to test the above on windows... but it works like a charm in OSX.

5 Responses to “Running your griffon application in fullscreen mode”

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1 levi_h Oct 14th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

Lucky you... getting a Swing application to run full screen used to be quite difficult (see http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/extra/fullscreen/index.html).
2 peter Oct 15th, 2008 at 6:03 am

@levi_h

well that tutorial is exactly what I used to understand how the Swing part of the story works; is this an old-fashioned approach?
3 levi_h Oct 15th, 2008 at 8:40 am

That's hard to say for The Java Tutorial - some of the parts really show their age. But if it's not, I wonder whether calling #setFullScreenWindow only will be enough. I mean, why all the code (in the tutorial) when all you need is a single statement?
4 peter Oct 15th, 2008 at 8:48 am

well, you'll need to get hold of a device the call #setFullScreenWindow on. If you refactor all the boilerplate Java code to Groovy the above is what remains.
5 levi_h Oct 15th, 2008 at 11:09 am

Yes, I understand that... I was actually thinking about active vs passive rendering and examples like http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/extra/fullscreen/example-1dot4/MultiBufferTest.java, which contain a whole lot more than a single setFullScreenWindow call. After reading a bit more, I see

Feel free to use passive rendering if you just want a simple full-screen Swing or AWT application, but remember that paint events may be somewhat unreliable or unnecessary while in full-screen exclusive mode.

which I remembered apparently.